What I mean by quality.... I'm trying to watch these movies on a 57 inch projection TV... nothing is really that clear.. letters are hard to read.. it's blurry.. just not a good dpicture..I also have trouble with the actual playback.. every once in awhie.. the video and the audio freeze up.. probably for about 6-10 secs.. then it starts again.. very frustrating.

I've been told it's a "media issue"... in that I need to try different brands to get the best one... I was told to try Maxell CD-80 XL and TDK...

The poor quality of the picture is not media related. VCD in general has quite poor quality and when that is combined to your large TV...SVCD on the other hand should be a lot better - see Afterdawn.com articles for more on that, or post at the according forum room.

But the fact that you experience player freezes might be media related. Browse around this forum and you'll find media reviews and also discussion about DVD players which seem to be quite picky.

So, you're taking already crappy-lossy-compressed (well, not necessary crappy, but lossy anyway) and encode it to another lossy format -- only thing what you expect is that the quality _will_ suck. Always try to maintain one lossy step at max -- rip from DVD to VCD and that's it.

But as you already have these clips in DivX/AVI, check if your Toshiba plays SVCDs. If it does, re-encode the clips to SVCD and you lose less quality.